Data is collected, organized, and processed for virtually every transaction and communication that occurs in today's global economy. The integrity of this information (e.g., the authenticity and/or security of a message) has become important to enterprises and individuals. Consequently, a variety of techniques for securing and replicating information processing sessions exists in the industry, such as when sessions are distributed across a wide area network (WAN).
Session distribution may include exchanging messages between participating members in a cluster, such as session creation, session destruction, session timeouts, and session ownership changes. Session distribution may include session replication, in turn, via broadcasting replicated session messages. However, as the number of servers and/or services in the cluster increase, the message traffic due to replication operations can also increase, sometimes exponentially.
This is because, in a cluster push model, every new session is replicated to every server in the cluster, across all WANs and LANs, since a session request can go to any of the members in the cluster. That is, authenticated sessions are replicated across the servers in the cluster, so that if a switch fails-over a user session from one proxy service on the server to another, there is no need to re-authenticate.
For example, when a proxy service sends messages from one LAN to another LAN across a WAN, the result can be a large number of session replication message transmissions across the WAN, the number dramatically increasing with the number of proxy servers. The latency of authentication session replication also increases with the number of proxy servers. It is the potential for such increases in message traffic and latency that generate a need for improved session replication techniques.